By Elizabeth Kolbert, Daily Comment, June 1, 2017<\/p>\n
After milking the fate of the planet for maximum drama, Donald Trump announced today that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris climate accord. To reach this decision, the President had to dismiss decades\u2019 worth of research by the country\u2019s most prestigious scientific organizations. He needed to resist pleas from the U.S.\u2019s staunchest allies; ignore appeals from many of its largest corporations, including ExxonMobil; and disregard the counsel of his Secretary of State. All this for, well, what? To shore up his base on the coal-hugging right?<\/p>\n
Analysis: telling literally every other country in the world to fuck off will probably create problems down the road,” David Roberts, who blogs about climate policy for Vox, tweeted<\/a>, as the news of the move began to leak out. But, if Trump\u2019s decision is evidently wrongheaded, it\u2019s also possible that it won\u2019t make all that much difference. This is in part because the U.S. had already effectively exited the agreement. In part it\u2019s because just about everybody outside the Trump Administration seems to understand that the U.S. is making a world-historical mistake.<\/p>\n \u201cIf Trump Dumps the Climate Accord, the U.S. Is the Loser<\/a>\u201d runs the headline of the cover story of next week\u2019s Bloomberg<\/em> Businessweek<\/em>. Among the many reasons that Trump\u2019s move makes no sense is that the Paris accord is a fundamentally weak agreement. Designed to avoid the need for approval by the U.S. Senate, it\u2019s not even an official treaty. Under the accord, each country was left to devise its own commitment\u2014or, as it is officially known, \u201cnationally determined contribution.\u201d In March, the Administration made it clear that it had no intention of fulfilling the U.S.\u2019s commitment, which was to reduce the country\u2019s carbon-dioxide emissions by at least twenty-six per cent by 2025 (a figure that\u00a0relies on a baseline from 2005). The White House did this by rescinding\u2014or, more accurately, indicating its desire to rescind\u2014the two sets of Obama-era regulations upon which the commitment was based: a set of stricter auto-efficiency standards and a series of rules governing emissions from power plants.<\/p>\n Even under these rules, it would have been a stretch for the U.S. to meet its Paris \u201ccontribution\u201d; without them, meeting the contribution has become, for all intents and purposes, impossible. (Instead of declining, the U.S.\u2019s emissions are now predicted to remain steady<\/a> through 2030.) But, since the country\u2019s commitment was, essentially, voluntary, the U.S. could have remained a party to the Paris accord while at the same time ignoring the agreement\u2019s terms. (In fact, technically, it will<\/em> remain a party to the accord, as the process of formally withdrawing will take years.)<\/p>\n Many in the climate-policy world argued that this course was preferable and that, despite the Trump Administration\u2019s atrocious behavior, it would be best to keep the U.S. at the negotiating table. Others worried that Washington\u2019s bad manners might be contagious. \u201cA rogue US can cause more damage inside rather than outside the agreement\u201d is how Luke Kemp, a climate-policy expert at Australian National University, put it recently, in the journal Nature Climate Change<\/a>. <\/em>Trump\u2019s decision has obviously rendered this debate moot. By withdrawing, the U.S. will join a select group of non-participants. Only two other countries, Syria and Nicaragua, are not part of the Paris agreement\u2014Nicaragua because it objected to the voluntary nature of the commitments.<\/p>\n One way to think about the Paris accord is as a diplomatic version of \u201cStone Soup.\u201d In the folktale, reluctant villagers contribute tidbits to a collective pot, and in the end everyone gets a meal. The story turns on a trick that overcomes the villagers\u2019 reflexive stinginess; by the logic of the scheme, the working-out of the illusion transforms it into reality.<\/p>\n In the climate treaty, instead of soup, the objective is a radically transformed energy system. If everyone believes that the transformation is going to happen (\u201ceveryone,\u201d in this case, meaning the world\u2019s major energy producers and the banks that finance them), then it will, in fact, take place: the illusion has the power to become self-fulfilling. This is the promise of Paris\u2014and, of course, the peril. The dynamic can run in either direction.<\/p>\n The U.S.\u2019s withdrawal could prompt other countries to reconsider their contributions. Or it could have the opposite effect. The Trump Administration is leaving the energy technologies of the future to other countries to develop, and many nations see an economic opportunity. As the headline of a recent post on Foreign Policy\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Web site<\/a> put it,\u201cIf Trump Dumps the Paris Accord, China Will Rule the Energy Future.\u201d\u00a0It is telling that several of the U.S.\u2019s largest tech companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Intel, signed an open letter to Trump, urging him to \u201ckeep the United States in the Paris Agreement.\u201d The letter states, \u201cBy expanding markets for innovative clean technologies, the agreement generates jobs and economic growth.\u201d On Tuesday, Apple\u2019s chief executive, Tim Cook, reportedly put in a call to the President<\/a>, urging him to remain in the agreement.<\/p>\n In another open letter to the President, which ran as a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal,<\/em> the heads of thirty other mammoth companies, including 3M, Cargill, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley, wrote to express their \u201cstrong support for the United States remaining in the Paris Climate Agreement.\u201d The C.E.O.s said<\/a>that they were concerned about the \u201cstrong potential for negative trade implications if the United States exits from the Paris Agreement.\u201d<\/p>\n Many commentators have suggested that the U.S., in withdrawing from Paris, is ceding its leadership role in the world. But the sad fact is that the U.S. has never been a leader in addressing climate change; this is one of the main reasons that the Paris accord is so weak. The U.S. has only been a leader in producing <\/em>climate change. (On an annual basis, America is now the world\u2019s second-greatest carbon emitter, behind China, but on an aggregate basis it\u2019s responsible for more of the excess CO2 in the atmosphere than any other country.) When Barack Obama helped forge the Paris accord, he was trying to make up for decades of American inaction. Trump has now nullified that effort. The just result would be that it is the U.S. economy that ends up suffering.<\/p>\n Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker<\/em> since 1999. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for \u201cThe Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n